Theme. A deliberately bleak, tongue-in-cheek map for National “Encourage a Young Writer Day,” comparing county-level writing/publishing employment from 1990 to 2023.
User-supplied datasets. Both employment datasets were supplied by the Ian Muehlenhaus and described as filtered extracts from U.S. Census County Business Patterns (1990 and 2023)..
1990 employment field used. SIC 2700 “Printing and publishing” total employment.
2023 employment field used. NAICS 519130 “Internet Publishing and Broadcasting and Web Search Portals” employment.
Density note. The two sequential choropleths map workers per square mile rather than raw counts. County area is computed geodesically from the county boundary geometry.
Percent change note. The change layer now uses the symmetric percent change in workers per square mile so counties with a zero 1990 density baseline remain mappable: 100 × (2023 density − 1990 density) / ((|1990 density| + |2023 density|) / 2).
Boundary geometry. County boundaries are loaded from the open us-atlas TopoJSON distribution, which republishes U.S. Census cartographic boundary files in a web-friendly form.
Libraries. D3.js and topojson-client via public CDNs.
Design / attribution. Made with Web Mapper GPT. Google Fonts: Caveat, Special Elite, and IBM Plex Sans. External APIs and libraries are attributed in-page and in the code comments.